adieyal/gov-software-audit

South African Government Software Audit # Software Audit of SA Government Departments How much does our government spend on proprietary software? I haven't found an audit anywhere so I decided to conduct one myself. ## Why do I care; Why should you? My estimate is that we are spending over R10 billion of public funds annually on proprietary software, the large majority of it to overseas companies through their local partners. That's essentially a pot of money that leaks out of the South African economy. Why not use open source software instead supported by local companies? There are lots of good reasons to using open source software most of which I won't mention but the ones I think are important for government are: * No vendor lock-in - software is often like a monopoly, once you've bought into it, the cost of moving to another system can be prohibitively expensive. Knowing this, vendors can maintain high prices with little fear of competition * Software quality - bugs are quick to fix - anyone can clone a repository, make the fix and send a pull request. The fix benefits everyone and doesn't require a long version update cycle. * Reduction of redundancy - Department A needs some software, Department B needs the same software - why do they both have to purchase their own software? * You want a feature? - You don't need to wait for the next version of the software and hope that your must-have feature is included. * Free? - nope - that's not at all true and should not at all be a reason to choose open source software. Apart from the above - my biggest argument for moving government to open source systems is economic. An additional 10 billion rand annually injected into the local software development industry will create a bundle of jobs and stimulate economic activity which is being lost to software imports. ## Arguments against going open source * *You'll need to re-train all of government* - hey, you have R10 billion to spend - spend some on training * *Open source software sucks* - you think so? …